'Now, will you let me go up and see the girl?' I asked. 'I'm scared she may do something silly up there on her own.'
He hesitated. Fear and love of the dramatic and the emotional were at odds in his mind. I said, 'For God's sake, can't you see what's in her mind? She feels that it's her fault my mother went over the cliffs that day. She needs me to tell her it's all right. If I'm not there — " I stopped then, loath to put the thought into words.
He nodded and got up irresolutely. 'I give you my word not to try to escape from you,' I said. 'And if the police are around we'll come straight back. Okay?'
He went over to the entrance and quietly eased back the bolts. Then he pushed back the top slabs and peered cautiously out. I was right beside him. The gallery was dark save for the light of our lamps on the rock wall immediately opposite the hideout. It didn't take me long to go up the cross-cut to the shaft and climb the stone sets to the top. The moon had just set. The sea's horizon stood out sharp and black like a ruled line against the vague light left in the night sky. The cliff tops were full of dark, huddled shapes, impossible to tell whether Kitty was there or not. I ran stumbling down to the sheds of the mine. She wasn't there. I started calling her name. It came echoing back to me from stone heaps and ruined mine buildings. But she did not answer. I went down along the cliffs towards Botallack Head. Time and again I thought I saw her. But it was only a bush or an old stone wall.
I didn't like that place at night. It gave me the creeps. It had been all right in full moonlight. But in this half-light it seemed hostile and withdrawn into some primitive past of its own. All those workings! The sweat of thousands of men had gone into honeycombing these cliff tops. Ignoring Dave's protest, I stumbled up and down along the top of those cliffs, calling her name. But never an answering call, save for a distant owl. I was beside myself. Kitty suddenly became very precious to me. I needed her. And I was afraid I'd lost her. Dave, limping along behind, caught up with me as I stood once again on the brink of the dark cliffs of Botallack Head. The place fascinated me. The long rollers marched in endless straight lines against the base of the cliffs. Black rocks showed in the boiling surf. Away to the left the old engine house stood like a castle outpost, its brick chimney half-smothered in spray. I thought I saw a body down there on a sloping slab that gleamed dully with the water that poured off it. I blinked and when I looked again it had gone.
The light played tricks. I stepped back. I don't suffer from vertigo, but there was something about those cliffs — they drew me Dave caught hold of my arm. 'It's back to the house she's gone. I'm thinking,' he said, with all the quick sympathy of an emotional nature.
'Yes,' I said. 'She's back at the house.' I turned away. 'We'll go up and see,' I added, and strode off inland to the track that ran up to Cripples' Ease.
He raised no objection. I could hear him limping along after me. The light was fading out of the western sky. It was getting darker every moment. The ruin of the old mine workings seemed to jump at us out of the night; strange, blurred shapes that had no substance. The lights of a car moving along the main road through Botallack village threw Cripples' Ease in sudden dark relief. Once more I felt that sense of unreality the building had conveyed that first night. It had no right to be occupied in the midst of all this desolation. It should have been allowed to disintegrate with the rest. It was part of the past.
The lights of the car beside it swung in a great arc. For a second I was looking straight into the beams of the headlights. Then they disappeared behind the house. 'Get down, man,' Dave called as I stood there, dazed by the brilliance. I dived behind a wall of ruined stonework. The car was coming down the track towards the house. Dave crawled up and lay panting beside me. 'What would a car be wanting here at this time of night?' he muttered. The tremor of his voice betrayed the state of his nerves.
Trippers coming back late from a dance,' I suggested. 'Not a bad place for necking.' But I don't think I believed that myself. Somehow I didn't see a young couple coming out here after the moon had set.